Help with developing a website

I purchased my domain name with the plan to develop a website to post, and publish some of my photos. I went with hostmonster.com who had a decent review and a special running.

www.tonybrianhardee.com


Does anyone have suggestions about how to develop an attractive site that is organized well to display photos and maybe a blog? I have no experience with HTML code. They website builder that they provide is very basic and kinda leaves me disappointed with the results.


Has anyone every purchased a template and used that successfully?


Is it hard to learn to build a website?


I don't have Frontpage, so is there a free/inexpensive alternative?

Any suggestions are appreciated

We're working with a pro site designer who also teaches Dreamweaver and coding classes at the local college. Her choice is joomla, which is a free open source program that's housed on the server. Basicaly as I understand it (and it is way over my head trying to explain it), she's building the templates for the pages, then we use joomla to manage our site and build pages. She does sites for lots of people, manages sites for many more, and she says joomla has worked out consistently to be the best for folks like my wife and me: Certifiable web mushrooms. You can use it to change wording or layout, add pages or post photos to galleries or create new galleries. Most of all it's WYSIWYG. Haven't even cracked the cover on it, but I've known and worked with her for years, and I trust her implicitly.

That's all secondhand, but worth a look since it's free.

There are a lot of alternatives. I have been happy with Web Easy software. I just rebuilt my site and have gotten positive feed back about it. The rebuild took me about 50 hours and that was starting from the site I had up for a few years. Starting from scratch may take a bit longer as you will refine the design as you go along. My site is 444 pages and about 400 pictures.

Another excellent way to develop a page is SeaMonkey by Mozilla. No charge. You are more likely to create good web site pages that can be used on different browsers.

Very intuitive to use.

Allows you to view the code.

At some point you will need to learn some basic HTML so you can modify your pages beyond the capabilities of the software you ar using.

Have fun.

Carol

thank you for the replies guys. Alot to process here

will sea monkey work with hostmonster as a host site?

Another vote for Web Easy software. Simple drag and drop and you don't need to know a single thing about html coding.

A word of warning about WYSIWYG only approaches...you don't know how web standards may change in future years.

I started my site 6 years ago with FrontPage. With Frontpage now discontinued, and support for many of it's features going away, I just started the process of reworking my pages with Expression Web. If you don't have any understanding of underlying HTML and of web standards, this could be a tough go! It's tough as it is, even with some understanding.

WYSIWYG is great, and even within FrontPage and now Expression, a big chunk of what you do can be designed that way. You're better off knowing at least the basics of HTML coding as well though.

Does anyone have any experience with Smugmug ?


Marty Fields
Seal Beach,CA

You may want to check out www.sitewelder.com. I use it and have been very happy.

mike